Time Warner Cable tries to put brakes on massive piracy case

As the US Copyright Group sues thousands of file-swappers in federal court, …

Time Warner Cable has no intention of complying with thousands of requests asking it to identify copyright infringers.

Remember the US Copyright Group? They're the DC legal outfit that is turning P2P copyright infringement into cash, partnering with independent movie studios (the big players are not involved) to sue individual file-swappers in federal court—and ISPs are not pleased with the plan.

"Copyright cases involving third-party discovery of Internet service providers have typically related to a plaintiff's efforts to identify anonymous defendants whose numbers rank in the single or low double digits," wrote the cable company. "By contrast, plaintiff in this case alone seeks identifying information about 2,049 anonymous defendants, and seeks identifying information about 809 Internet Protocol addresses from TWC."

Time Warner Cable does not have enough employees to respond to these requests. In a typical month, the company receives an average of 567 IP lookup requests, nearly all of them coming from law enforcement. These lookup requests involve everything from suicide threats to child abduction to terrorist activity, and the company says that such cases take "immediate priority."

Once law enforcement is served, the four full-time workers (and one temp) who make up the ISP's Subpoena Compliance team can turn to other matters, such as subpoenas in civil cases.

The company says that it has the capacity to handle 28 subpoenas from the US Copyright Group per month. Instead, TWC was hit with a request for 809 names within 30 days. In addition, the company has received two other subpoenas, both from the same law firm, asking for another 398 and 224 IP address lookups. Each lookup costs TWC $45.

"If the Court compels TWC to answer all of these lookup requests given its current staffing, it would take TWC nearly three months of full-time work by TWC's Subpoena Compliance group, and TWC would not be able to respond to any other request, emergency or otherwise, from law enforcement during this period," said the filing. "TWC has a six-month retention period for its IP lookup logs, and by the time TWC could turn to law enforcement requests, many of these requests could not be answered."

A page of suspected IP addresses from the Far Cry case

Quash, baby, quash!

The ISP has now asked the court to quash the subpoena for three reasons.

First, because US Copyright Group lawyer Tom Dunlap "has now simply reneged" on an agreement that he worked out with TWC to manage the flow of subpoenas.

Second, the entire approach to these lawsuits may be invalid. Filing lawsuits can be expensive; Most federal courts charge a $350 filing fee per case, along with a new set of paperwork. Each case also creates another docket to keep track of, making thousands of cases an administrative nightmare.

Instead of going this route, plaintiffs have gone the RIAA route, simply filing mass lawsuits against groups of "John Does," in some cases by the thousands. But, says TWC, channeling its inner Ray Beckerman, "It is not evident from the complaint in this case that there is anything common to the 2,094 defendants that would justify joining them in a single litigation... Courts facing these identical circumstances have repeatedly held that a plaintiff may not join in a single action multiple defendants who have allegedly downloaded or facilitated the download of copyrighted material at different times and locations.

"Thus, if the plaintiff wants to sue these 2,094 defendants, it owes this court 2,094 separate filing fees, and it must file individual actions. Plaintiff then would be unable to combine together a single, massive discovery request with which to burden non-party ISPs such as TWC."

Third, plaintiff lawyers keep expanding the scope of their subpoenas. The first complaint filed alleged 426 infringing IP addresses belonging to TWC subscribers. But when the company finally received a subpoena, it found requests for 809 IP addresses.

Taken together, said TWC, these "discovery abuses" mean that the judge should quash the subpoena. Alternately, the judge should limit the plaintiff to 28 TWC subpoenas each month.

According to the court docket, Comcast and Cablevision are trying to work out their own deal with the lawyers to keep the work to a minimum, though they could also ask the judge to quash the subpoenas if no agreement can be reached.

The power of self-interest

Time Warner Cable has not always had the reputation of a white knight when it comes to helping its subscribers—the company famously tried to squeeze more cash from broadband users by applying ridiculous data caps, an issue so sensitive to it eventually drew the wrath of senators and congressmen.

But in this case, with its own self-interest also on the line, TWC has made an argument that strikes not just at a single subpoena but also at the overarching legal strategy behind the US Copyright Group's work.

107 Reader Comments

"Time Warner Cable has no intention of complying with thousands of requests asking it to identify copyright infringers."

"Time Warner Cable has not always had the reputation of a white knight when it comes to helping its subscribers..."

They may say publically they have no intention of doing this, but they in fact will comply voluntarily. I'll give you a hint as to why...What movie producing activities are associated with Time Warner?

From the article: "First, because US Copyright Group lawyer Tom Dunlap "has now simply reneged" on an agreement that he worked out with TWC to manage the flow of subpoenas."

See that statement? It means they were already working on complying with this before they came public with it.

From the article: " According to the court docket, Comcast and Cablevision are trying to work out their own deal with the lawyers to keep the work to a minimum. "

They intend to comply, just on their terms, and they intended to from the very beginning but their first deal fell through. They are not doing anything to not comply as the article title indicates.

They don't have the intention of being the White Knight in this case either. They just want it all very puiblic to make sure their customers can say "Oh, poor TW, they put up a fight but the courts got them."

They are not doing anything to put the brakes on at all, they just do not want to be in the middle of the street when the brakes fail.

Obviously the government should just have all of these records on hand at all times, should anyone want them for any reason.

Obviously? Your proposing the U.S. Government collect and keep records which for all practical purposes only interest special interest groups like the RIAA and the US Copyright Group, and for the most part where over 99% of the information collected would be useless? So your proposing that the U.S. Government now also act as the records collection and retention agent for these special groups, and shell out even more money to pay for the record storage/retention, collection efforts, and then applying the various laws concerning collection and release of records? All paid for by the U.S. Tax Payer just to serve a special interest group?

I hope you were being funny because thats the dumbest thing i've ever heard.

I understand what the US Copyright Group is trying to do and I applaud their efforts. At the same time if you're going to pursue legal action it needs to be handled properly rather than trying to shoehorn thousands of individual cases under a single subpoena using what some might perceive as a loophole. If the cost is prohibitive lobby for the creation of a specific infringement case that allows for this type of subpoena.

While I applaud the fight the reasoning seems kind of silly to me. Does TWC employ such poorly skilled Sys Admins that they can't pull these in a matter of days if not hours? Working for a bank I see all kinds of subpeona's for different information. The "Legal Compliance" department doesn't do any of the work on it. They hand off the data they need to the sys admin group and we're expected to get the data as quickly as is feasible and it really isn't that bad as we write scripts that do it all for us. Toss the listing of IP addresses they want into a txt/csv file and just run a powershell or *NIX script against it to get all the data. Given that the logs are most likely kept in either a non-proprietary text or DB format it would probably be pretty easy.

I also don't see the $45/request. You run the script, have it output all of the results to a spreadsheet or another text file and email the file containing all the requests to the court. Simple and easy, to me it just sounds like their IT department is lazy. I've had to come up with a far greater amount of data as part of my day to day sys admin duties and it rarely takes me more than 8 hours, with most of that being an automation process doing all the work for me. The only exception to that being email restores because those take 12-16 hours per day per DB as anyone who has worked with Exchange and Legato backups can attest to, but there is nothing anyone can do about that.

They may say publically they have no intention of doing this, but they in fact will comply voluntarily. I'll give you a hint as to why...What movie producing activities are associated with Time Warner?

Time Warner Cable is a separate entity from Time Warner now(and has been since March 2009). They are not connected in anyway, except for the name.

Obviously the government should just have all of these records on hand at all times, should anyone want them for any reason.

Obviously? Your proposing the U.S. Government collect and keep records which for all practical purposes only interest special interest groups like the RIAA and the US Copyright Group, and for the most part where over 99% of the information collected would be useless? So your proposing that the U.S. Government now also act as the records collection and retention agent for these special groups, and shell out even more money to pay for the record storage/retention, collection efforts, and then applying the various laws concerning collection and release of records? All paid for by the U.S. Tax Payer just to serve a special interest group?

I hope you were being funny because thats the dumbest thing i've ever heard.

Take your sarcasm widget in for tune-up. Also you might want to have your angst-a-doodle looked at. That high pitched keening makes me think it's running a little hot.

While I applaud the fight the reasoning seems kind of silly to me. Does TWC employ such poorly skilled Sys Admins that they can't pull these in a matter of days if not hours?

That was pretty much my thought as well... have these guys never heard of log management software? The only way the times make sense are if they're having to recall backup tapes and restore the log files... Maybe that's where the $45 cost comes into play - having to recall off-site tapes?

I say Time Warner Cable should turn over their customers' details to the authorities, so they can immediately receive the therapy they must need after watching Far Cry. These people are at danger of committing suicide, and we need to help them urgently.

And what's funny is, I saw an ad for cable internet, I think it was Roadrunner (which uses Warner Bros.' Roadrunner character as its mascot -- is this TWC?) that said with their Internet, you could download all the music, movies (and pictures) you wanted. Now, of course I know there are legal ways to download movies and music. But the ad didn't say that. It didn't even say "hey -- respect copyright". They just made it sound as hassle-free as it could be, and no legal downloading is truly hassle-free.

People know you can get music and movies for free. It's common knowledge now. (The best methods aren't, but that's beside the point.) Cable companies know this, and they know DSL users know their Internet can be faster, and they know cable customers know they have the fastest and crave more. I'm pretty sure cable internet companies are selling piracy, if only through inference, at this point. I had 3Mbit DSL, and it was fine for YouTube and Hulu and Xbox Live. Cable goes up to 10Mbps around here. Who needs more than that?

btw, why is it when i press TAB, instead of highlighting the "leave your comment" button, it highlights the ARS logo way at the top of page? its a pain...

A lot of people don't realize this, but the site has a detection protocol that senses when people thinks 'Ars' is an acronym and inappropriately capitalize it. When it detects that, it fucks with you. Must be setting it off for some reason...

So I live in an apartment and the guy upstairs has stupidly left his wireless with no security. It was a simple matter to clone his MAC address and use his wireless connection to download whatever movies, software and music I want. There is nothing to trace it back to me since I accessed his cable modem and erased the logs of my initial entry (he, of course, left the default password on the cable modem which was a cinch to figure out).

The way the courts are now anyone could sue my upstairs neighbor for piracy and he would have no chance of winning in court, since with piracy you are guilty until proven innocent. They can't really PROVE that any particular PERSON has downloaded anything. But that won't stop them from suing, or winning.

Ok, so I lied to prove my point. I didn't really do that to my upstairs neighbor. But anyone could at any time because he really does have an unsecured WAP.

Considering my university charges $50 to do that kind of look up (and charges the student the fee once they're connected to it) there's probably more to it than just punching some numbers into a database and pressing enter. I have a feeling it could be as simple as there not being an actual database, just a bunch of raw text outputs dumped by the kernel or networking software. Once you consider how big those files could end up being searching becomes a much more difficult task. Could it be done better? Sure, want to tell to the entire network software community to rewrite that part of the code (which might be decades old and rock solid stable) to output to a database just to make copyright holders happy?

So I live in an apartment and the guy upstairs has stupidly left his wireless with no security. It was a simple matter to clone his MAC address and use his wireless connection to download whatever movies, software and music I want. There is nothing to trace it back to me since I accessed his cable modem and erased the logs of my initial entry (he, of course, left the default password on the cable modem which was a cinch to figure out).

The way the courts are now anyone could sue my upstairs neighbor for piracy and he would have no chance of winning in court, since with piracy you are guilty until proven innocent. They can't really PROVE that any particular PERSON has downloaded anything. But that won't stop them from suing, or winning.

Ok, so I lied to prove my point. I didn't really do that to my upstairs neighbor. But anyone could at any time because he really does have an unsecured WAP.

See that statement? It means they were already working on complying with this before they came public with it.

From the article: " According to the court docket, Comcast and Cablevision are trying to work out their own deal with the lawyers to keep the work to a minimum. "

They intend to comply, just on their terms, and they intended to from the very beginning but their first deal fell through. They are not doing anything to not comply as the article title indicates....

They are not doing anything to put the brakes on at all, they just do not want to be in the middle of the street when the brakes fail.

They have asked for the subpoena to be quashed completely as their first choice, and have gone after the very grouping of John Doe cases that makes this approach possible. I'm not sure why you suggest they aren't doing "anything."

The second option they propose, if the judge refuses to quash, is to handle only 28 a month--which means that this single Uwe Boll case would take more than 2 years just to get everyone identified (and US Copyright Group has filed numerous such cases). The deal they thought they had struck with US Copyright was similar--28 IDs a month.

What the article says is that they have no intention of complying with "thousands of requests asking it to identify copyright infringers," and they do not. They want 28 a month or nothing.

The only way the times make sense are if they're having to recall backup tapes and restore the log files... Maybe that's where the $45 cost comes into play - having to recall off-site tapes?

This is the probable case. TWC likely has massive amounts of logs, generated from devices literally all over the map, not just from a single datacenter at a single address. Check out the dates and times in the page of suspected IP addresses; none is less than two months old.

They need to change the law in civil cases so you cannot subpoena for information. If you cannot connect the dots yourself, then you have no claim to shit.

So, if your bank account is hacked, you don't want law enforcement to be able to use computers to track down the hacker and bring him to justice. You don't want the Bernie Madoff's of the world to get what's coming to them because if you have to ask for the information to prove their crimes, it's your fault you were victimized.

US Copyright is abusing the court system to squeeze people for money. Their attempt to circumvent the law to file mass lawsuits and mass subpoenas shows how they are trying to maximize profits and cut costs. It's not about copyright, it's about a shakedown.

I'm not defending those who illegally copied a movie. Let the plaintiff sue one by one and recover damages, and pay the costs of discovery. They can recover reasonable costs as part of a judgment if they really have a good case.

While I applaud the fight the reasoning seems kind of silly to me. Does TWC employ such poorly skilled Sys Admins that they can't pull these in a matter of days if not hours? Working for a bank I see all kinds of subpeona's for different information. The "Legal Compliance" department doesn't do any of the work on it. They hand off the data they need to the sys admin group and we're expected to get the data as quickly as is feasible and it really isn't that bad as we write scripts that do it all for us. Toss the listing of IP addresses they want into a txt/csv file and just run a powershell or *NIX script against it to get all the data. Given that the logs are most likely kept in either a non-proprietary text or DB format it would probably be pretty easy.

I also don't see the $45/request. You run the script, have it output all of the results to a spreadsheet or another text file and email the file containing all the requests to the court. Simple and easy, to me it just sounds like their IT department is lazy. I've had to come up with a far greater amount of data as part of my day to day sys admin duties and it rarely takes me more than 8 hours, with most of that being an automation process doing all the work for me. The only exception to that being email restores because those take 12-16 hours per day per DB as anyone who has worked with Exchange and Legato backups can attest to, but there is nothing anyone can do about that.

While I applaud the fight the reasoning seems kind of silly to me. Does TWC employ such poorly skilled Sys Admins that they can't pull these in a matter of days if not hours? Working for a bank I see all kinds of subpeona's for different information. The "Legal Compliance" department doesn't do any of the work on it. They hand off the data they need to the sys admin group and we're expected to get the data as quickly as is feasible and it really isn't that bad as we write scripts that do it all for us. Toss the listing of IP addresses they want into a txt/csv file and just run a powershell or *NIX script against it to get all the data. Given that the logs are most likely kept in either a non-proprietary text or DB format it would probably be pretty easy.

I also don't see the $45/request. You run the script, have it output all of the results to a spreadsheet or another text file and email the file containing all the requests to the court. Simple and easy, to me it just sounds like their IT department is lazy. I've had to come up with a far greater amount of data as part of my day to day sys admin duties and it rarely takes me more than 8 hours, with most of that being an automation process doing all the work for me. The only exception to that being email restores because those take 12-16 hours per day per DB as anyone who has worked with Exchange and Legato backups can attest to, but there is nothing anyone can do about that.

I assume most of the time involved with filling a request comes from legal footwork. The actual lookups should be as easy as: take excel file, convert to database table, relate to list, batch lookup in list, print to table. It'd take a few hours tops, mostly depending on how many entries are in their maintained list. time spent at keyboard: a few minutes the first time, a few seconds thereafter.

They need to change the law in civil cases so you cannot subpoena for information. If you cannot connect the dots yourself, then you have no claim to shit.

So, if your bank account is hacked, you don't want law enforcement to be able to use computers to track down the hacker and bring him to justice. You don't want the Bernie Madoff's of the world to get what's coming to them because if you have to ask for the information to prove their crimes, it's your fault you were victimized.

US Copyright is abusing the court system to squeeze people for money. Their attempt to circumvent the law to file mass lawsuits and mass subpoenas shows how they are trying to maximize profits and cut costs. It's not about copyright, it's about a shakedown.

I'm not defending those who illegally copied a movie. Let the plaintiff sue one by one and recover damages, and pay the costs of discovery. They can recover reasonable costs as part of a judgment if they really have a good case.